


on the horizon

by starstrung



Category: The Martian (2015)
Genre: Gen, Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 09:14:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5579845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung/pseuds/starstrung
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day starts like any other. Mark swings out of his bunk or, technically, Vogel’s bunk. Mark doesn’t sleep in his own bunk much, just like he doesn’t wear much of his own clothes. He needs to remember to thank Beck for packing so many hoodies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	on the horizon

**Author's Note:**

> Few things go well for Mark in this, and if you're queasy about semi-graphic descriptions of wounds/injuries, maybe avoid reading this.

It is Sol 402. It has been almost four hundred days since Mark has seen another human being.

The day starts like any other. Mark swings out of his bunk or, technically, Vogel’s bunk. Mark doesn’t sleep in his own bunk much, just like he doesn’t wear much of his own clothes. He needs to remember to thank Beck for packing so many hoodies.

He eats a potato and a half, sprinkled with a miniscule amount of salt, and cleans himself up as best as he can without soap or toothpaste.

Avoiding the mirror, he looks himself over, poking at the hard outlines of his ribs that have begun to sprout out of his torso. His skin, stretched taut over bones weak with low-gravity and leeched of color without exposure to sunlight, feels more translucent than anything. An impressive collection of bruises stand in stark contrast on his arms and legs, and he can feel more on his back. 

Rebuilding a Rover armed only with limited supplies and one scrawny astronaut is rough, to say the least, especially when a low-protein diet means you don’t heal as well as you used to. He’s not going to be winning any races anytime soon.

Satisfied that he’s fit for work, he puts on his suit, cinching it as tight as it will go, and steps into the airlock. A familiar movement of air tugs at him as the airlock depressurizes, and then the door opens up on the Martian landscape.

The first thing he sees when he steps outside is Lewis.

He stares at the figure in the distance for a long time, his breathing gone slightly more labored than usual. The arm is raised, waving slightly as if gesturing for him to approach, sunlight glinting off of the helmet visor and obscuring the face. He knows it’s Lewis though. Without a doubt.

His eyes stay fixated on that point in the horizon for what seems like an hour, and it is a long time before he is able to move. His friends aren’t on Mars. They left him behind, but they’re coming back for him. He hangs onto that thought. His friends are coming back to Mars, and he won’t let them find him as a corpse, or worse. 

Mark shakes his head, slaps his gloved hands on his helmet, and heads over to the Rover to get started. He makes sure not to look up from his work at all after that.

-

SOL 402 // HAB TERMINAL // 13:22

“I saw the Commander,” Mark says. When he does his logs these days, he avoids looking at his face on the screen, keeping his eyes on the camera lens. He doesn’t want to recognize the face he sees there.

Mark doesn’t talk for a while, lost in his thoughts. He has noticed that translating words into speech takes extra effort.

“Eight sols ago, it was Beck,” he confesses.

“I swear I saw him right outside the Hab. It - it was dark. The wind had picked up. Maybe it was that. The sound - it was like someone beating on the walls from the outside. I thought - he was  _ right there _ . I suited up, went outside to check. Swear I could hear him calling for help.”

Mark trails off, resting his chin in his hand. After a while, he smiles, small and wry and too tired to be afraid. The dark circles under his eyes have started to cast shadows of their own. He hasn’t had a full night’s sleep in what feels like two hundred sols.

“Hallucinations, huh?” he says, and ends the log.

-

It’s not just hallucinations. 

That voice in his head that usually gives him advice when something is a stupid idea seems to be abandoning him. He’s not sure what to call it. Self-preservation instinct? Impulse control? Turns out that might be a non-renewable resource on Mars.

He is sitting on a dune of Martian sand, trying to catch his breath after a long hour of hard work, still making adjustments to the Rover. He can tell that the rations have affected him - normal work tires him out much quicker than it used to. The sand under him is loose and fine and rust-red, and he occupies himself by running his fingers through it and watching the sand shift into the rows he makes.

A strange shaped rock catches his interest and he picks it up, studying its texture through his helmet. He wonders what it feels like.

He’s already loosened his glove before he realizes.

Or rather, his suit’s alarms alert him to his mistake by blaring in his ears, screaming at him to “ _ Put that thing the fuck back on, Mark! _ ” It’s almost a relief when his ears pop from the loss of pressure, since it muffles the sound marginally.

He’s unprepared for the sudden decompression and so his arm snaps backward with the force of air hissing out his suit through the thin, open slit. If he had been standing, he would have surely been knocked backwards.

Cold slices into his wrist, that small shred of exposed skin going cold, then burning, then numb, in the short few seconds that he has his glove off. It astonishes him at how fast it all happens, the thin Martian atmosphere drinking deeply from his nice 37 °C body heat. By the time he reacts and pulls in his flailing arm enough to tighten the glove back on, he can’t feel his arm all the way up to his bicep.

He clutches his hand to his chest, as if to warm it faster. His heart is pounding all over again in time with the alarms that are still ringing while his suit pressurizes. Pins and needles prick at his skin like his nerves are punishing him for forgetting that it’s  _ fucking cold _ on Mars. 

He flexes his hand experimentally, hoping that he wasn’t exposed long enough for ice crystals to rip tears in his tissue. There’s no easy fix for frostbite other than staying warm. He thinks about his potato plants, leaves breaking off like spun sugar in his hands. He isn’t eager for the same thing happen to his skin.

Maybe he should start duct-taping his gloves every time he goes outside so he doesn’t try  _ that  _ again. Mars keeps finding new and improved ways of killing him, but being betrayed by his own mind is honestly the lowest blow. There’s no reasoning out of this one. Solving this particular problem is hard when he can’t even trust what he sees.

Standing up, he gets back to work. Mindless labor - that sounds like the only cure right about now.

-

It would be nice to say he learns from the experience.

About a week later, Mark drives until he can’t see the Hab in order to test out some new modifications. He’s waiting for the computer’s readings to stabilize, and then something makes him open the door and step outside. This time, fortunately, he has his suit on.

He walks until he can’t see the Rover.

A sprawling vista of red sand and distant mountains meets him, and no matter where he turns, no mark of humanity blots the horizon. Even his own trail of footprints is being smudged away by the wind. Standing there, the solitary witness to this planet’s emptiness, his loneliness feels like less of a curse and more like a calamity.

As he turns around to go back to the Rover, cheeks streaked with tears, he sees Johansson in the distance, a small figure, arm waving for him to follow.

-

SOL 434 // ROVER 2 DASHCAM // 9:03

“Just got off the phone with NASA,” Mark says into the camera. “It turns out, they don’t appreciate it when their astronauts start doing weird shit for no explainable reason!”

He pauses to wipe sweat off of his forehead. The RTG is in the back, giving off the smell of burning rubber and making the air around it shimmery with heat. 

“I keep forgetting they’re taking pictures of my every move down here,” he says. “Creepy, if you think about it.” He cranes his head to look out the window into the sky, as if to catch site of a satellite watching him at this very moment. 

He makes a rude gesture. It’s silly, but it makes him feel better.

-

Mark leaves a few things off of his log. Like how NASA had asked him a string of questions that rang familiar of the psych evals back home and he lied on every one. 

Luckily, they still only have text-based communication available. He’s got too many tells to be a very good liar in person. Martinez used to clean him out in their poker games every time, before Lewis put her foot down and said it went against her delicate Marine sensibilities (he might be paraphrasing her words). In short, lying is a lot easier when he doesn’t have to make eye contact with anyone.

He wonders just how large of a team NASA has tasked with running through every contingency, every outcome where prolonged isolation on a desolate planet catches up with Mark Watney and NASA’s mission goal of getting back a whole astronaut gets that much more unlikely. If he told them the truth: about the hallucinations, about the sleep deprivation, about the glove, about his latest jaunt into the Martian wasteland, they would either shit kittens, or nod righteously at each other like they expected this to happen. 

So he lied.

It’s the first time he’s done that. Sure, he’s evaded the question, obfuscated the truth, even flat-out refused to answer the question a couple of times if he thought it was a stupid one (the botanist he’d been talking to hadn’t enjoyed that). He’s never  _ lied _ .

The story he’s sticking to is that he saw what looked like debris out in the distance, and that’s why he had gotten out of the Rover to investigate. Perfectly reasonable motives, good enough to satisfy the folks back home.

NASA will find out eventually when he gets back to Earth, either by him telling them, or through the logs he’s already done. But the worst they can do is ground him, which would be hilarious. He almost wants that to happen now. 

-

The airlock door to the Hab closes for the very last time, and he has to stop himself from thinking that he’s leaving home.

Mars isn’t home. The Hab isn’t home. Home is that pale white circle in the sky, and he’s going to make it there.

He drives away in the Rover and refuses to look back until the very last minute. By then, the Hab is a hazy pale silhouette, obscured by dust that the wind has rolled in.

Martinez stands where the MAV used to be, watching him drive away.

-

The journey to the Ares 4 landing area is uneventful, mostly. He sends periodic status updates to NASA, sticks to schedule, and makes sure not to walk off too far away from the Rover.

He tries not to look too far into the horizon either, scared of who he’ll see.

At night, the stars shine through the thin layer of dust that sweeps over the surface, and it’s more of the galaxy than Mark will ever see on Earth. Of course, he saw more than his fair share of starry skies when he was in the Hermes, but there’s something different about stargazing when you’re on a planet, looking up. 

As a kid, he would stargaze all the time, dreaming of spaceflight. And now he’s here.

Mark rests his head against the wheel of the Rover, and sleeps under the stars.

A storm rolls in as he sleeps, but he must be more exhausted than he thinks because he doesn’t wake up until a particularly strong gust knocks him over.

“What the--”. He gets to his feet with some effort, buffeted by the dust.

A small dust storm whips around him. Once he’s on his feet, it’s not strong enough for him to have to put his weight against the onslaught of dust and sand, which is probably why it didn’t show up on NASA’s satellites. They would have told him about anything mission critical.

He isn’t fully awake yet, or maybe his curiosity is winning the fight against his good sense, so instead of going back into the safety of the Rover until the storm passes, he stands in the middle of it, and watches.

The wind isn’t what he’s feeling, he knows that. The Martian atmosphere is too thin for strong winds. It’s the sand and dust that he feels now, that he felt on Sol 18 when the communication’s array snapped under that sand and dust and marooned him on Mars.

The sand scours his faceplate and rips at his suit hard enough that he feels the pressure against his bruised skin, and the force of it knocks his breath out of his lungs. 

His mission and the planet that he’s on are both named after the same ancient god. He thinks, if there’s any sign of a god of war, it’s in the simple violence of this moment, of the primal way his heart beats faster, calling for his survival.

Lightning arcs overhead, brief and sudden, and the flash of light illuminates a figure he recognizes as Vogel, standing by the Rover, as if to guide him to safety. 

-

SOL 545 // ROVER 2 DASHCAM // 14:36

“I hate this fucking planet,” Mark says, his voice tense with pain. He has pointed the camera away from his face, and onto his thigh, where a jagged wound bleeds. 

“Sliced myself on a piece of metal,” he explains, bloody hands sorting through a heavily depleted bag of medical supplies. Luckily, he still has plenty of staples.

“At least I was - ow, fuck - inside, so my EVA suit didn’t breach,” he says. Using the camera as a mirror, he cleans the wound as best as he can with hands that shake. 

Taking a deep breath, he pinches the blood-slick skin together. “I’m all right.” He staples one edge closed. “It’s not - everything’s fine, I’m fine.” Another staple, a quick dab at the blood beading out. “I’m not gonna die, this is - it’s all cool.” He makes the rest of the staples in quick succession, and then lets out his breath all in one exhale.

Mark leans back into the Rover’s seat to catch his breath. “It kind of sucks how I’m getting pretty good at this,” he says, tossing the stapler back into the bag of supplies. Using a piece of gauze, he gently wipes at the skin around the wound. It has stopped bleeding.

“I’m going to take a break for the rest of the day,” he says, sounding sleepy. “Maybe take a Vicodin, play some of Johansson’s bad video games.” He wipes his hands on his already ruined pants, and lifts a bottle of water up to his lips to drink.

“It feels like I just finished modifying the Rover and now they have me started on the MAV,” Mark says, his voice getting quieter and less coherent with every word. The hand curled over his thigh goes slack. 

“Just gon’ rest m’eyes a bit,” he mumbles.

Mark begins to snore. 

-

SOL 555 // ROVER 2 DASHCAM // 10:03

“You know, it would just be my luck, wouldn’t it? Here I am, in the most sterile, lifeless place humanity has set their boots on, and some asshole bacteria decide to fucking  _ infect _ me.”

The camera is pointed at his wound again. It is not healing well. The skin is inflamed, and when he pulls out the staples, his breathing going ragged, pus wells out of the wound.

“That’s not good. That’s - yeah, that’s pretty gross.” He cleans the cut thoroughly with antiseptic, swearing loudly every time he draws breath. When he’s done, he re-staples the wound, and then injects himself with antibiotic for good measure. 

“Hopefully that’ll work. Either way, I’m getting off this planet in a few days.” He sighs, and cleans up the medical supplies that he has littered around him.

“Well, that was a fun interlude. Back to work.”

-

It is the day of the launch and he lets himself looks at his reflection in the mirror for the first time.

The beard, he can shave off. The hair, he can trim. He’s been haunted by apparitions and fighting for survival ever since being stranded here, but it’s the eyes he sees in that mirror that he’ll remember the most. 

-

Half an hour before the launch, and the Hermes comes close enough to Mars for them to link audio communication to the MAV.

It’s possible that he’s spent a lot of time thinking about this moment - his first real conversation with another human being in over five hundred days. He had his heroic, one-liners planned. The Commander would ask for his status, and he would say, confident and fearless, “Get me the hell off this planet, Hermes!”

Instead, when he hears Lewis’ voice, when she speaks to him, it’s like a punch to the gut. He barely hears what she says, weak with happiness and relief.

His friends are here.

He’s going home.

**Author's Note:**

> My [tumblr](http://www.shadowsbroker.tumblr.com).


End file.
